游戏邦注：本文作者是Paul Johnson，其为Rubicon Development联合创始人及总经理。文章主要讲述Rubicon最新iOS游戏《Great Little War Game》。

《Great Little War Game》已发行将近3个月。游戏既推出瞄准iPad和Retina设备的高清版本，也发行迎合3GS手机的低分辨率版本。

Great Little War Game from mzstatic.com

我们刚在苹果平台取得颇具里程碑意义的15万美元营收。

游戏开发成本约为10万美元，所以我们已处在盈利状态，这是我们首次尝试独立开发内容，因此此成绩颇令人兴奋。

采用正确定价模式

我们尝试过各种定价标准。奇怪的是收入几乎都维持在每天1000美元左右。我们目前的价位是2.99美元和4.99美元，同商店其他内容的价格相比，我觉得这个价位相当合理。

此数据同《愤怒的小鸟》成绩无法相提并论，但我还是非常满意。我们置身各大榜单前列，但自我们抬高价格后，游戏就跌出这些热门榜单（游戏邦注：这些榜单是基于下载量而非收入排名的）。

榜单位置和评价的影响

一个有趣的发现是处在热门榜单之外并未明显影游戏销量，榜单位置似乎并不会带来正面回馈，就目前来看，榜单位置同销量其实关系不大。这同我以往的认识相左，听起来有点不切实际，但数据不会说谎。

目前我们有93万名“玩家”，但其中有75万名用户是在应用置身每周FAAD（每日免费应用）时下载的。这促进非HD版本销量大幅提高，由于植入些许物有所值的虚拟商品，游戏获得可观营收，不论是就新销售量而言，还是从免费版虚拟交易情况来看。

游戏发布几天后大获成功，这款游戏获得了在App Store首页New and Noteworthy版块的推荐。此前我们的日营收约为700美元，后来就窜升至6000美元。遗憾的是，这仅维持几天便出现急剧下滑，虽然我们的作品整整在N&N出现1个月。虽然这种收入不足为道，令我们惊讶和失望的是此泡沫现象竟如此迅速便破灭，原本我们以为此销售业绩能够维持1个月。

各个游戏版本的销售情况(from gamesbrief)

上图绿色高峰点呈现的是我们在最大iOS游戏网站TouchArcade获得5星级评价的时间点。图中你可以看到一个相当突出的峰点，但这并未维持很久，也未呈指数趋势发展（游戏邦注：“突出”评价虽然容易取得，但并不是我们应该关注的内容）。

神奇法则

我希望你们能从中有所收获。若你有所发现，欢迎分享。在试验各种评价、苹果功能、销量和免费赠品内容过程中，我并未得出任何神奇法则。

总的来说，我觉得项目非常成功。虽说营收尚不足以购买一部法拉利，但却足以让我们养家糊口，着手下款应用。未来作品将推出Android和PS Vita版本，因此我们或许还能够从中获得些许额外收益。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Selling an iPhone game: The sales figures in detail
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By Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson is the co-founder and managing Director at Rubicon Development. He’s give us his insights in the sales figures for Rubicon’s latest title, Great Little War Game, currently available on iOS.

This post originally appeared on indiegamer.com and is reproduced with permission.

Great Little War Game has been out on sale now for about three months. It’s available in HD format for iPad and Retina devices, and there’s a low definition version for 3GS phones too.

We just passed a milestone income from Apple of $150,000

Development costs were about $100,000 so we’re already in profit which is kinda cool for our first serious outing into genuine indieland.

Getting the right pricing model

We’ve tried pricing all over the place. The odd thing is that the income remained fairly consistent at about a grand a day come what may. We’re currently on a price of $2.99 and $4.99 which I do think is probably fair in comparison with other titles on the store.

These are hardly Angry Birds numbers but I’m pretty happy with them. We spent some time at the top of various charts, but have plummeted out of the important ones since we upped the price, as they’re based on downloads and not gross.

The effect of chart position and reviews

An interesting observation is that being outside of the top charts has not affected our sales in a noticeable way – chart position doesn’t seem to reinforce itself with positive feedback, and I’d go so far to say that charting is actually irrelevant to sales. That goes against everything I thought I knew and certainly sounds dodgy, but the numbers don’t lie.

We have 930,000 “players” right now, but 750,000 of those picked the game up free when we went with FAAD for a week. That kick-started sales of the non-HD version of the game and because we have a couple of good value in-app purchases, is netting a worthwhile sum by itself – both in new sales and in-apps from previous freebies.

We hit the holy grail a few days after launch – the front page “all categories” version of New and Noteworthy. We were doing about $700 per day before that and it quickly peaked to $6,000. Sadly that only lasted a few days before a fairly rapid drop off, even though we were on N&N for a full month. I guess the money that made is nothing to cry about but tbh we were surprised and disappointed that this bubble rapidly burst – originally we were hoping to do those figures each day for the whole month.

The spike in the pic where the green dots are indicate when we got a five star review from the biggest iOS games site on the net – TouchArcade. You can see a nice spike there, but it didn’t last long and didn’t exactly exponentiate. Seems that “big” reviews are handy but not something to fret over either.

The magic formula

I hope some of you can get some use out of this. If you can deduce anything from it, please share it with me. Having tried a variety of things from reviews, Apple features, sales, giveaways, etc. I’m no closer to having a magic formula than I was on March 20.

In summary, I consider this project a success. It’s not going to buy us any Ferrari’s, but it is actually turning a profit big enough to carry our wage bill while we develop the next big thing, and hopefully that’ll continue for some time. There is an Android version imminent and PS Vita version whenever they release the bloody thing, so maybe by then we’ll be making some proper dosh.（Source：gamesbrief）